While there are many uses for large printed images, especially for advertising, there are no satisfactory and inexpensive methods for accurately producing them without a special purpose printing press which is generally expensive.
One method used for printing large images, is to use a specialized printing press capable of handling large sheets of paper. The image is divided up into parts, each as large as the press can handle, or the entire image is printed on one sheet. Generally a press which can handle media having a width equal to the width of the final image is used so that matching need be done in only one direction. The different parts of the image are then printed and the image is created by accurately manually cutting or matching each page along premarked lines and then assembling the parts together manually.
There are several shortcomings to using this method. First, a large special purpose printing press, capable of handling large sheets of printing media must be used. Second, the media must be accurately cut and fitted together manually in order to create the very large sizes of printed images. The reason manual cutting and fitting is needed is that most printing methods leave an unprinted margin around the printed portion of the media. The width of the unprinted margin and the exact placement of the image is unknown before the actual printing.
Another method that can be used to print large images is to use a regular printing press, and then fit together a very large number of small pieces which are cut from the printed images which make up a large image. This method is uneconomical owing to the large amount of work needed to register, cut and paste the pieces together, and the resulting large image is seldom satisfactory.